Installment 11. If Men Have All the Power How Come Women Make the Rules?
Share this compelling intro to the Men's Movement with your skeptical friends.
Debunking the Notion of Female Superiority
“I believe that women are the more spiritually advanced sex.”
— Erica Jong, Washington Post, December 6, 1992
If women are so wonderful and kind and loving, why are so many women saying such awful things about their mothers?
“We [women] have to start looking at our feminine shadow and own that as a part of ourselves and stop projecting it onto males and onto the masculine. It creates the idea that only men abuse. It’s only men who are patriarchal. It’s only men who are controlling, or greedy, or competitive, all of those negative adjectives that get attached to men and masculinity. Women are capable of just as much viciousness, cruelty and abuse as men.”
— Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., author of Reclaiming the Dark Feminine
Women are not inherently more peaceful than men.
“If you talk to the principals, they will tell you that the worst fights to try to break up are those among girls because they tend to be more violent.”
— Howard Co. (Maryland) School Superintendent Michael E. Hickey, quoted in the Baltimore Sun, May 16, 1997
“In a 1993 survey of Ontario high school girls, [a] community psychologist… put the following question to them: Defining violence as broadly as they wished, who were they most afraid of? Overwhelmingly, they responded, ‘Other girls’.”
— Patricia Pearson in her 1997 book When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence
Blaming us for war is like blaming women for diaper rash. Both just come with the job.
If you tell a group of people that their primary mission in life is to bring home —and keep —as much bacon as they can, and if there really is no such thing as “enough,” conflict among those people is inevitable, especially when bacon is scarce.
When you’re at a party or a bar, take a look around. Check it out on TV. Notice how many times women slap, punch or shove men who do or say something the women don’t like. It happens so often we don’t even see it anymore.
Women do not perpetrate less domestic violence than men do.
John Archer, professor of psychology at the University of Central Lancashire in Britain and president of the International Society for Research on Aggression, analyzed 99 studies involving 34,000 men and women. He found that women initiate domestic violence more often than men do.
Dr. Malcolm George, a lecturer at London University, researched the claim by women’s advocates that women are violent only in response to violence by men. “The view is that women are acting in self-defence but that is not true—50 per cent of those who initiate aggression are women.”
— derived from The Independent (Britain), November 12, 2000
Professor Murray Straus, co-director of the New Hampshire-based Family Research Laboratory, says that the women’s activists who propagate bogus and anti-male statistics about domestic violence “are from the ‘all men are bastards’ branch of feminism.” He cited a Stats Canada study involving almost 26,000 Canadians. It found that seven per cent of men and eight per cent of women were assaulted by their partner. “In repeated surveys starting in 1975 [in the U.S].… we get about 10 per cent of men severely assaulting a partner and about 10 per cent of women. It’s within one per cent. For both minor and severe assaults the rates are approximately the same.”
— derived from The Calgary Herald (Canada), November 6, 2000
“The research and evidence couldn’t be clearer—domestic abuse of men is a problem similar in magnitude to that of abuse of women… And society needs to see that yes, very often it is the 6-foot-2-inch male who is the one getting attacked by his 5-foot-5-inch wife.”
— Carol Ensign, director of Valley Oasis in LA county, one of the few domestic violence shelters in the USA that helps battered men, Los Angeles Daily News, August 21, 2001
“Female approval of husband assault remains as high now as it was twenty years ago: Twenty-three percent of women believe that ‘slapping the cad’ is just fine.”
— Patricia Pearson in her 1997 book When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence
“Women’s violence has become increasingly legitimised. There is a sense now that it’s OK to ‘slap the bastard.’”
— Dr. Anne Campbell, a psychologist at the University of Durham, quoted in The Independent (Britain), November 12, 2000
Women are not naturally more caring, loving and unselfish than we are.
“Those who have experienced dismissal by the junior high school girls’ clique could hardly, with a straight face, claim generosity and nurture as a natural attribute of women.”
— Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in her 1991 book Feminism Without Illusions
Non-custodial fathers pay 60.0 percent of the child support they are ordered to pay. Non-custodial mothers pay only 46.8 percent.
— derived from US Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Table 1, April 1998
“When I started researching this book, I was prepared to rediscover the old saw that conventional femininity is nurturing and passive and that masculinity is self-serving, egotistical, and uncaring. But I did not find this. One of my findings here is that manhood ideologies always include a criterion of selfless generosity, even to the point of sacrifice. Again and again we find that ‘real’ men are those who give more than they take.”
— Anthropologist David Gilmore, in his 1990 book Manhood in the Making
Why are the two largest male events of recent years—Promise Keepers and the Million Man March—concerned with how men can do an even better job of giving, while the two largest female efforts — NOW and the Million Woman March — are about how women can do an even better job of getting?
“Feminism: It’s all about me… Feminism today is wed to the culture of celebrity and self-obsession.”
— Time magazine cover story, June 29, 1998
At a meeting of 1960s and 1970s feminists in New York, the “veterans” decried the rise of the “me-oriented” culture and the sense of entitlement among many young feminists today. “We have produced a generation of uppity women who feel entitled,” feminist author Erica Jong said.
— derived from Women’s eNews, May 26, 2002
A psychiatrist once told me that in his experience the biggest difference between men and women generally is that women focus on what people need and men focus on what people deserve. At first I didn’t get it, but I’ve since come to see it makes a lot of sense.
Female culture has deep roots in the care of infants. It knows that if you don’t give a baby everything it needs it will die. Much of what women need to give babies—breast milk—comes more or less automatically to them. So women most often can say, “yes” (though exhaustion and famine can make it difficult and even impossible).
Male culture has deep roots in providing material goods for women and children. It knows that if you always give a child everything it needs it will always be a child, it will always need and it will never deserve; it will never take care of itself much less help take care of others. Much of what men need to provide can be scarce and hard to come by. So men more often will say “no,” and often in saying “no” they are providing an important intangible: a lesson in survival and frugality.
Both points of view are valid and necessary. A band of humans totally dominated by one point of view would quickly die out. If babies got only what they earned, they would die in a few days because they can earn nothing. If babies always got whatever they needed they would never grow to provide for themselves, to say nothing of providing for others. They would always be burdens, never assets, and would drag the tribe quickly to oblivion.
Therefore, women cannot rightly claim that because they say “yes” more they care more.
The tribe needs a flexible, dynamic relationship between male and female values, between focusing on needing and deserving. It’s good when a family has that kind of balance between its husband and its wife. It’s even better when both the husband and wife have that kind of balance inside themselves, so that the tension and differences between them are not so stark and they are more likely to meet near the middle to begin with.
The male-female dichotomy mirrors the classic conservative-liberal divide, so balance is important not only in the private raising of children, but in many public policy decisions as well. (How, for instance, can we help poor people without encouraging them to remain poor so that we’ll have to continue helping them and they’ll continue needing help?) In fact, I think a strong case could be made that the extreme and vitriolic partisanship we’ve been seeing in Congress of late not only parallels but is actually connected to the extreme distrust and hostility we’ve developed between male and female cultures in the past thirty years.
In fact, the terminology “male values” and “female values” can be misleading if it causes men to think they shouldn’t be soft sometimes and women to think they should never be firm. Even though one culture is primarily associated with masculinity and the other is associated primarily with femininity, perhaps we should call the two cultures Culture 1 and Culture A.
“My ‘kind, caring, sharing side’ is my ‘kind, caring, sharing side’ not my ‘female side.’”
— writer Rich Zubaty
Women are not naturally more committed to monogamy than we are.
An old idea that is popular these days is that boys and men are “naturally” interested in having sex with many partners and that girls and women are not (since they’re more loving and virtuous and interested in “commitment” only for the pure spiritual value of it). Anthropologist Helen Fisher, in her 1992 book Anatomy of Love, says the idea was already well entrenched in people’s minds when another anthropologist named Donald Symons came up with an evolutionary explanation for this supposed fact: having sex with lots of women makes it more likely that a man will keep his genes alive into future generations. As Fisher says, “many scholars bought [Symons’ explanation] like a better chocolate bar.” Now people talk about it at parties as if it were established, even self-evident fact.
But Dr. Fisher points out that women too have their reasons to “cheat” and “play around”: to acquire resources from other men, to keep one or more men on backup in case her current man dies or fails her economically, to give her offspring a mix of DNA so they are not all vulnerable to the same diseases, and to seek sexual variety to keep her sex life vibrant.
“[After a female black-capped chickadee hears her mate being outdone by another male in a song contest, she] will sneak out before dawn and meet with [the] rival male for a coupling. Then she flies back home as if nothing happened and continues to live with her partner… The effect of these extra matings is that some chicks in the nest have been fathered by some other male chickadee… And the betrayed male apparently never knows the difference.”
—Associated Press, May 3, 2002, reporting on a study in the May 3, 2002 issue of the journal Science
[M]ost monkey and ape females are not seeking to mate with the one best male, and to attach themselves to him. Rather they promiscuously solicit matings from multiple males…[so] no one male could ever be certain of paternity. Primate males—including males in our own species—have this problem… [In the old perspective on mothers there is no recognition] that female sexual desire and the peculiarly flexible patterning of sexuality found in many primates evolved so as to manipulate information available to males about paternity… It simply didn’t occur to those thinking in terms of “madonna”/“whore” dichotomies that from an evolutionary perspective, the two might be inseparable.
—anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in an interview with her publisher
about her 2000 book, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection
“In 1999… the American Association of Blood Banks exploded a quiet bomb with a published survey showing that in as many as 28.2 percent of 280,510 genetic samples studied [by DNA analysis], the putative father was not the biological one.”
—New Jersey Law Journal, March 4, 2002
“[In cases of questionable or disputed paternity] the overall exclusion rate for 1999 was 28.2% for accredited labs. Exclusion rates for non-accredited US and foreign labs were slightly less at 22.7% and 20.6% respectively.” [“Exclusion” refers to the exclusion of the putative father as the biological father.]
—American Association of Blood Banks Annual Report Summary for 1999 Prepared by the AABB Parentage Testing Standards Program Unit
Women do not “create life.”
The uterus is not a magic vessel. The sperm and egg together are what generate the impulse for new life. Then the embryo takes charge of its own development, using the uterus only for stability and food.
“The experiment was testimony to the hardy independence of the embryo. One key to the embryo’s integrity is its ability to produce a placenta… The fetal placenta is a versatile, opportunistic… organ.… On an endocrine basis, on a hormonal level, the fetus appears to be totally autonomous.”
— Omni Magazine, December 1985
An egg without a sperm is like a sperm without an egg. Neither amounts to much.
More installments to follow